Literary Critic. Has-been Skateboarder.

Month: September 2015

The Time I Got Really Stoned and Interviewed Jesse Eisenberg | Literary HubThe idea of me interviewing Jesse Eisenberg for this website had been floating around for a while. At first I was going to do it, then I wasn’t, then I was again. I was supposed to talk to him Friday night, then Saturday, and when I contacted Jesse’s people on Sunday morning, they said they’d find out what was going on. So when I heard nothing more, I figured it wasn’t going to happen. So I got really stoned. And now I have to interview my first genuine (i.e. non-literary) celebrity while high out of my goddamn mind.

In Search of the Real Truman Capote | The AtlanticMusic for Chameleons is Capote’s most idiosyncratic book, his flat-out weirdest, but it’s also his most honest, and, in many ways, his best. It’s a shaky testament to a complex figure, and the battle with himself that he would never quite win. It captures Capote’s vast range, his uncanny ear for speech, his fascination with crime and process, his unprecedented access to celebrities and criminals alike—but most of all, Music for Chameleons captures his heart, hidden just below the pages. He wasn’t a saint, but he needn’t have been. Capote was a true artist—his blood was ink—and artists are more beautiful than saints, anyway.

Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem | PANKThe short story form serves Jonathan Lethem well. An imagination and intellect as keen as fertile as Lethem’s can take any idea and run with it for as long as he likes, which can result in, for instance, his disastrous 2009 novel Chronic City. Or it can produce something wondrous like The Fortress of Solitude. But Lethem’s stories, like his essays, allow him to explore a conceit with the same brilliant mind while simultaneously preventing him from wearing out his literary welcome.

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